A grants administrator gets a night out in the field

An 'adorable' owlErica Lawler usually works from a desk in William & Mary's Office of Sponsored Programs, but she recently got a chance to go into the field with some of her clients from the Center for Conservation Biology to capture and release saw-whet owls.
Photo courtesy of the Center for Conservation Biology

Erica Lawler
says that they look like little ice cream cones, but Lawler is in fact
referencing the upside down northern saw-whet owl that she was able observe after
an opportunity she took to spend a night out in the field with them.

Libby Mojica,
a wildlife biologist at the Center for Conservation Biology, invited Lawler on
the investigative excursion after Lawler expressed an interest in the fluffy
pint-sized animals. Lawler says being close to the active research was fantastic
new and different experience. Her typical duties at William & Mary are on
the paperwork side as an administrator in the Office of
Sponsored Programs processing grants for the CCB and other researchers.

Lawler and
her colleagues are vital parts of the research aspect of William & Mary,
but she typically can only ever get as involved in actual research as reading
grant applications and reports. This time however, she witnessed all of the
processes that go into data collection of the northern saw-whet, and then was
even allowed to hold one for a few minutes.

“The Center
for Conservation Biology has a lot of data depicting over time when there is a
boom population, or when the migration gets thrown off course,” says Lawler. Researchers
net the small owls for banding, measure and weigh them to create a profile of
their presence in Virginia. Lawler notes that this year changes arose after the
late October hurricane that forced the saw-whets further inland.

On a night in
mid November, Lawler accompanied Mojica and three-year veteran CCB technician Zak
Poulton to some off-the-beaten-path trails to work with these owls. While it
may have been Lawler’s first time out in the woods with the owls, the CCB has
been working with the species for almost twenty years now.

“The project started in 1994 when the Center for Conservation Biology saw an information gap in the life cycle of these migratory
owls,” says project leader Fletcher Smith of the CCB. Smith explains that scientists
had no knowledge of a significant presence of the saw-whet any more southern
than Cape May, New Jersey; so when 50 were accounted for in the lower Delmarva
Peninsula in just the first year, that seemed like the beginnings of something
really amazing.

Smith says that within one year of the project’s birth, CCB
researchers had banded over a thousand owls, more than any other banding
station in the mid-Atlantic. The ornithologists seek to determine how many owls
are coming through, and where they’re going.

Researchers
use mist nets to capture these owls, whose only defense mechanism is to shut
their eyes very tightly and hold perfectly still. Lawler says this behavior is
exactly why people think saw-whet owls are so calm and gentle.

“Each net has
four little pockets so that when the owls fly into the net they kind of bounce
down and get caught up in the pockets to hold them in one place,” said Lawler. After
being caught and removed from the net, the first step of the process is banding
owls that haven’t been caught before and recording the data on the already-banded
owls.

The next step
was to weigh the owls. A drinking glass is attached to a portable scale, tared
to zero.

“Head first
the little owls got dropped in, and you could see them looking at you through
the glass!” says Lawler. The inverted owls in the drinking glass made Lawler
think about ice cream cones. Her one-word description of the saw-whet:
“adorable.”

“The part I
thought was the most interesting was when they used the black light,” Lawler
explained. This specialized technique is used in determining the ages of these
owls. A black light wand is waved over their human hand-sized bodies, and the
newest feathers glow brightly. Feathers from years before that haven’t been
molted out yet do not show up so vibrantly under the black light, allowing
researchers to determine how old the owl is based on how many times the animal
has molted.

The owls then are treated to a period of
readjustment in total darkness, a time when Lawler herself was allowed to hold them
before they fluttered off into the night.

“It’s really
neat for me because so much of the time I’m just on the budgeting and agreement
side of the research, and you can feel very removed from what’s actually
happening,” says Lawler. “It does give me some perspective."